Converged Infrastructure (CI) is the grouping of multiple computer and storage elements into a single, optimized computing package. CI is also referred to as “converged system,” “unified computing,” “fabric-based computing” and “dynamic infrastructure.”
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) usually refers to a fully software-defined IT infrastructure. The difference between CI and HCI is that in HCI, both the storage area network (SAN) and the underlying storage abstractions are implemented virtually in software rather than physically, in hardware.
Example techniques for operating an HCI system can be found, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 9,830,082.
NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMF) defines a common architecture that supports a range of storage networking fabrics for NVM block storage protocol over a storage networking fabric. NVMF is specified, for example, in “NVM Express over Fabrics,” Revision 1.0, Jun. 5, 2016, which is incorporated herein by reference.